Europe’s song contest has not brought change to Azerbaijan. What could?

WHEN Azerbaijan won the Eurovision song contest last year, local campaigners hoped that hosting the contest this year would shine a fierce spotlight on the country's human-rights record. They have been disappointed. Many protesters inspired a year ago by the Arab spring are still in jail, independent journalists continue to be locked up and political murders remain unsolved. Families have been forcibly evicted with inadequate compensation to make room for new construction projects, including the Crystal Hall, the futuristic, LED-coated arena where Eurovision is taking place.

The European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which owns Eurovision, has come under fire for treating the Azerbaijani government with kid gloves. Though it held a workshop on media freedom earlier this month with several of the country's human-rights groups, it has shied away from criticising the evictions and stayed silent on a demonstration in Baku, the capital, this week that was violently broken up. The EBU insists that Eurovision is “apolitical”, even though countries such as Azerbaijan, desperate for international approval, clearly use it for political aims.

As an association of broadcasters from 56 countries, the EBU is hamstrung. Frank-Dieter Freiling, chairman of the contest's board of governors, is disappointed that there has not been more criticism of the regime, but says governments should have used the opportunity to apply more pressure themselves. That seems unlikely to happen on any great scale: Europe sees Azerbaijan as a small but important contributor to reducing its dependence on Russian gas. And although Azerbaijan's relations with Iran and Turkey, two traditional allies, have been souring—Iran recalled its ambassador this week—it is a strategic access point to Afghanistan for America, and to Iran for Israel.

By contrast, the foreign press has covered human rights extensively in the run-up to Eurovision. EBU officials privately wonder why places such as Russia and Turkey, with their own human-rights abuses, did not enjoy the same scrutiny when it was their turn to be host. Yet given the modest impact of the coverage so far, once the 1,500 international journalists in Baku have packed up and gone home any effect is unlikely to last.

Optimists can see seeds of longer-term change. True, the economy remains overwhelmingly dominated by energy. Oil and gas revenues have allowed the government to boost defence spending, stoking fears of renewed conflict with neighbouring Armenia. By 2017 the export capacity of the huge Shah Deniz gas field is expected to more than double. However, oil production, a far larger share of revenue, is falling. The squeeze on the budget will eventually force the government to think about diversifying the economy, says Sabit Bagirov, head of the Entrepeneurship Development Foundation, a think-tank. There is one promising sign, he adds: an e-government programme designed to reduce people's contact with officials is having an effect on rampant low-level corruption.

Opposition parties, led by an ageing and exhausted generation, have shrunk to nothing more than “dissident clubs”, says Hikmet Hadjy-Zadeh, a prominent member of one of them. But a new generation of internet-aware campaigners is becoming bolder. One of them, Mr Hadjy-Zadeh's son, Adnan, spent a year in jail for “hooliganism” when some thugs beat him up shortly after he had made a satirical video. At the time he was working as a spokesman for BP, the developer of the Shah Deniz field and the regime's most faithful prop. After an international outcry, the younger Hadjy-Zadeh got his job back once he had emerged from jail.

Khadija Ismailova, an investigative journalist who has published stories about the private wealth of the clan of Ilham Aliev, Azerbaijan's president, was smeared by a secretly filmed sex video that was posted online. In her case, too, international indignation helped. The support emboldened her, she says, and the internet makes her work easier.

It will take years, however, for the new generation of dissidents to gather meaningful force. For now Mr Aliev's regime, which is already working on a bid for the 2020 Olympics, can assume that its opponents offer no threat.